Although the US is working hard to change automotive standards to reduce emissions, home efficiency standards are still pretty weak. We are doing well with the adoption of LED and CFL lighting, but it’s grudgingly and so many people use electric heating and stoves from the 70s that the energy saved from lighting is a drop in the bucket. Being aware of how much energy your home is drawing… Read More

Streaming video platform Brightcove has added another partner to its already-impressive group of associates. Vudu, purveyors of fine set-top boxes, have struck up a deal to stream Brightcove-associated content. Brightcove has, at last count, about twenty-one trillion API partners, and delivers video for big names like AOL and the NY Times. Those aren’t available on the Vudu box yet… Read More

The year: 1984. The scene: a young man’s computer desk. Don’t touch that floppy! Don’t — it’s the devil!
This fantastic music video (from the age when music, and videos, were actually like this) documents the journey of a young man into a sordid land of temptation, liquor, and skull-faced, laser-eyed evil. The power of smooth compels you! Read More

For some reason I instantly said yes when Adam Bird cornered me at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and asked me to go to Nottingham (in the UK) on Tuesday to judge the Nott Tuesday startup competition.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against Nottingham (or startup competitions) but going from Nottingham to Ljubljana, for Seedcamp Slovenia the day after, for is going to make… Read More

Last week, Acer let the cat out of the bag by revealing the expected launch date for Windows 7. There was no real reason to doubt it, but now we’re pretty much sure it’ll be October 23rd or thereabouts. A Microsoft press release has made it all very clear: Read More

I’m sorry, but for as good as Google is at organizing the world’s data, Google News absolutely sucks. Now, to be fair, I’m going to focus on Google News from a tech news perspective, because that’s what I follow. Maybe it’s better in other areas, but I doubt it’s much better. I bring this up because a new update to the service today promised “More ways… Read More

Remember that picture of the G1v2 we saw last week? We were puzzled at the bottom row buttons, and a commenter at BGR figured out the riddle. It turns out those are Motorola-style buttons (see them here and here?), not HTC. I thought the keyboard looked HTC-ish, but hey, we all make mistakes right? In any case, the phone pictured appears to be a Motorola phone running Android, although… Read More

One of my longstanding gripes with Facebook Platform has been its lack of a unified payment platform that would offer developers a way to tie a Facebook-branded payment system into their apps. Back in March 2008, the company announced that one was coming in the “next 180 days”. That milestone came and went, and since then the company has been quiet about its current progress… Read More

One of the biggest knocks against traditional media isn’t necessarily that it’s not online — most of it is now — but rather that it’s slow when it comes to delivering news. By the time an old media site gets a story approved, written and edited, a dozen blogs probably have already covered the same news. That’s not always the case of course, and for those… Read More

MSI has been expanding their territory aggressively over the last couple years. Originally they were mostly about components, but now they’re a leader in netbooks and are rolling out stuff like these headphones. They look like pretty standard, despite the inclusion of a “unique G Logo Power indicator” (they light up) and a “golden-plated USB interface to eliminate… Read More

Check out this awesome warning, apparently real, that happens when your iPhone’s internal temperature gets above safe operating levels. I love that it refers to itself in the third person. “iPhone is hot. Go get iPhone a beer. Then you can use iPhone.” Read More

Samsung just unleashed a few TVs that are only an inch thick, and back at CES we saw a prototype from Panasonic that was a third of an inch. But this display, a thin-film plasma from Shinoda, is all of one millimeter thick. Read More

OpenOffice, everyone’s favorite free software office suite, released version 3.1 recently. It seems like only yesterday I was downloading StarOffice, what later became OpenOffice. The OO.org team keeps plugging away, and the fact that they’ve released such a comprehensive office suite is a real testament to the power of open source development. There are lots of new improvements… Read More

Babble, a magazine and parenting community site aimed at urban hipsters, has secured $1 million in Series A funding from Greycroft Partners. This round adds to the $2 million Babble raised earlier from Village Ventures in December of 2008. (This is an extension of that round at the same valuation) Spun off from sex and dating community Nerve Media, Babble takes a more modern view on… Read More

Not content with making me happy with their GMT, Bell&Ross has just released this weird piece for Colette, some sort of artsy shop in Paris. This is some kind of tribute to Airborne Rangers, I suspect, with a little skull and two sword hands. Not sure how much it would cost in Earth money but I’m willing to bet a few grand. Read More

TechCrunch Europe is putting together a round-table event in Stockholm on May 27. TechCrunchTalk Nordic will be an afternoon of panel discussions and presentations followed by a networking reception. We’ll be bringing together the startup, Angel and VC communities together to debate the next phase of the startup world in Scandinavia, Finland and the Baltic countries – which… Read More

Poor MacDrive. The latest hot tamale of a rumor says that, starting with Snow Leopard (10.6), Windows users will be able to access Mac files without the use of any special software. You’d mount the Mac as you would any other Windows machine. Read More

The clock’s ticking for Playboy, folks.
During an earnings call earlier today, Playboy Enterprises‘ interim CEO Jerome Kern (who replaced Hugh Hefner’s daughter Christie after she stepped down last December) didn’t really have any uplifting news to share. The publishing company reported a $13.7 million net loss during the first quarter of 2009, more than 3 times the loss… Read More

Oh man. We’ll have more on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare shortly, but enjoy this teaser until the full trailer launches in a couple of weeks. We can’t wait for this release and the rumored Vietnam-era Call of Duty. Read More

Google can’t help itself. It just loves to brag about how green it is, even though its data centers use up a tremendous amount of energy. Still, on a per-search basis, it is less polluting than many alternatives – a fact it likes to remind us of, especially since it was accused of being an energy hog last January. In a greener-than-thou blog post touting how energy efficient its… Read More